The treatment of the arable gives the clue to all other sides of the subject. The rights of common usage of meadow and pasture carry us back to practices which must have been originally applied to arable also. When one reads of a meadow being cut up into strips and partitioned for a year among the members of the community by regular rotation or by lot, one does not see why only the grass land should be thus treated while there is no re-allotment of the arable plots. As for the waste, it does not even admit of set boundaries, and the only possible means of apportioning its use is to prescribe what and how many heads of cattle each holding may send out upon it. The close affinity between the different parts of the village soil is especially illustrated by the fact, that the open-field arable is treated as common through the greater part of the year. Such facts are more than survivals, more than stray relics of a bygone time. The communal element of English mediaeval husbandry becomes conspicuous in the individualistic elements that grow out of it. The question has been asked whether we ought not to regard these communal arrangements as derived from the exclusive right of ownership, and the power of coercion vested in the lord of the soil. I think that many features in the constitution of the thirteenth century manor show its gradual growth and comparatively recent origin. The so-called manorial system consists, in truth, in the peculiar connexion between two agrarian bodies, the settlement of villagers cultivating their own fields, and the home-estate of the lord tacked on to this settlement and dependent on the work supplied by it. I take only the agrarian side, of course, and do not mention the political protection which stands more or less as an equivalent for the profits received by the lord from the peasantry. And as for the agrarian arrangement, we ought to keep it quite distinct from forms which are sometimes confused with it through loose terminology. A community paying taxes, farmers leasing land for rent, labourers without independent husbandry of their own, may be all subjected to some lord, but their subjection is not manorial. Two elements are necessary to constitute the manorial arrangement, the peasant village and the home farm worked by its help. If we turn now to the evidence of the feudal period, we shall see that the labour-service relation, although very marked and prevalent in most cases, is by no means the only one that should be taken into account. In a large number of cases the relation between lord and peasants resolves itself into money payments, and this is only another way of saying that the manorial group disaggregates itself. The peasant holding gets free from the obligation of labouring under the supervision of the bailiff, and the home estate may be either thrown over or managed by the help of hired servants and labourers.